Organization is the number one virtue any business must have to be able to succeed. Whether your business is large or small, a virtual assistant may just be what you need to keep organized. Here is a list of concerns about outsourcing for your business.
1. A virtual assistant (VA) could be more efficient than a secretary who comes to the office everyday.
You won’t see your VA, but you can coordinate your work schedule so that what you need to be done gets done. No worries about coffee breaks, lateness, sick leaves, maternity leaves, and so on. If a virtual assistant is committed to work for a period of time, it is all work.
Virtual assistants are usually hired on a contractual basis, either working per project or for a specified number of months. You can choose them according to particular skills that you might need and because they do not work for you for long terms, you can hire different VAs when your needs change. Or hire more than one at the same time.
These assistants have other clients and are not dependent on you as their main source of income. Therefore relieving one of their services to hire another is not as difficult as firing your in-house assistant to look for a new one.
2. A VA may not be cheaper than a live secretary but she / he can still save you a lot of money when it comes to payroll time.
Cyber-assistants are not inexpensive, but you do not have to pay extra for office space, utilities, and worker’s compensation. Outsourcing means that you will pay them by the hour for equivalent requested work.
Also, they come complete with their own utilities, hardware and software: internet connection and email, phones, fax machines, and basic software. If a virtual assistant lists down Joomla! and Photoshop as skills, then they should have the programs already installed in their computer. You need not buy the software, nor any other basic utilities that they will need to do a good job.
3. A VA need not replace the secretary who comes to the office everyday.
You can hire a virtual helper and still maintain your in-house assistant. Live secretaries can take care of real time services, such as phone call management, dictation, and event management, while a VA can do all online transactions, such as client management and travel arrangements. Of course, a virtual assistant can do all these, although they probably won’t be able to make you a cup of coffee.
4. A VA does not need to be retrained to do her job.
VAs advertise their list of skills so that you can get one who can fulfill all your requirements. Of course, when you start working with anybody, there will be specific ways of doing things that you’d like to be followed. After that, a very efficient assistant should be able to pick up on those details right away and do the rest of their work smoothly, without any trouble.
Whether you run a large company looking to either replace or merely append to your work staff, or a small business, outsourcing a VA more than justifies the minimal additional cost, if any. In the long run, with increased productivity through efficient organization of your work flow, virtual assistants would have been a big factor in your business’ success.
